Top Tweets for #bizons

1800s: The Great Plains of North America support the largest herbivore migration in world history. 60 million bison. From Canada to Mexico. Moving in herds that took days to pass a single point. Beneath their hooves: 3-7 feet of topsoil. The deepest, richest soil on Earth. Built over thousands of years by the exact process the bison represented. Graze intensely. Move on. Trample plant matter into soil. Fertilize with dung. Let grass recover. Return next year. Repeat for millennia. The grassland evolved with them. The soil was their creation. 1860s-1880s: The US government has a Native American problem. Plains tribes are mobile, militarily effective, and completely dependent on bison for food, clothing, tools, shelter. Kill the bison, you kill the tribes' independence. General Sherman states this explicitly: "Kill every buffalo you can. Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone." Railroad companies offer bounties. "Buffalo hunters" kill thousands per day. The carcasses are left to rot. Sometimes just the tongue is taken. The rest wasted. 60 million bison in 1800. Less than 1,000 by 1889. Native Americans forced onto reservations. The stated goal achieved. But the land notices. Without bison hooves breaking soil crust, rain runs off instead of penetrating. Without bison dung, soil microbes starve. Without intense grazing followed by rest, grasses can't regenerate properly. The topsoil that took 10,000 years to build begins disappearing. 1930s: The Dust Bowl. Topsoil literally blows away. Farms destroyed. Millions displaced. Massive economic collapse. Ecological catastrophe. "Experts" blame farmers for plowing marginal land. They ignore the obvious: The soil was fine for 10,000 years with 60 million bison. It lasted 40 years without them. The bison weren't destroying the land by grazing. They were building the soil through the very process we eliminated. Today: The Great Plains has 48 million cattle. That's 25% fewer large ruminants than existed naturally as bison. Yet cattle are blamed for environmental destruction on land that was literally built by large ruminants doing exactly what cattle do now. The American Serengeti had 60 million grazers and the deepest topsoil on Earth. We killed them, destroyed the soil within decades, and now blame their replacements for the damage.